What are you Cooking the week of April 21, 2019?

[Mike Nolan]

Happy Easter! We're having baked ham for supper, and probably potatoes au gratin.

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[Joan Simpson]

Happy Easter to everyone.Just me and my husband so not cooking much.We had a chicken salad sandwich and chips.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by Joan Simpson.

[BakerAunt]

I'm making maple-glazed pork tenderloin with mashed potatoes and steamed green beans.

[Italiancook]

Turnips ruined my Easter dinner. I decided to make The Neely's (Food Network) Mashed Turnips with Sage. First of all, either I cut the turnips too large, or turnips just take longer than potatoes to boil soft. By the time the turnips were soft, the ham and the roasted mushrooms were over-cooked. They were done before the turnips turned soft, and I should have removed them from the oven, but I thought I'd let them stay warm in the turned-off oven. Mistake! When I finally had the turnips and the lone potato mashed, the mushrooms were crispy and the ham dry. It was a ham steak, not a whole ham.

Now, I know better how to time making mashed turnips. I mashed them by hand, since the last time, they were a runny disaster when I whipped them with the mixer. After these two forays in mashed turnips, I have decided turnips absorb a lot of water when boiled. Both times, the finished product was runny. I used only a little butter and milk and still had a problem. The pan had been well-drained. It's the turnips. Before I try mashed turnips again, I'm going to search online for hints on how to do this. Otherwise, the turnip mashed tasted fine.

[Mike Nolan]

You have my sympathies, the last time I did a ham it came out crunchy, and that's not a good thing.

This time I wrapped it in foil, lowered the initial temperature and heated it for about 90 minutes after marinating it in pineapple juice for 2 days. It was perfect, the rye bread was great, and the potatoes au gratin were probably the best I've made. We also had some strawberries for dessert.

[Joan Simpson]

Today we had cubed steak,rice,beets and creamed corn.

[Mike Nolan]

Steak, mushrooms and steamed broccoli tonight

[Italiancook]

Dinner will be Creamy Rigatoni. Using my tomato sauce from the freezer, heated with enough Mascarpone to make it creamy.

[Mike Nolan]

I made a pan of sponge candy today, using a CIA recipe. It'll be a few hours before I can try to break it up and see how it looks on the inside, but it looks pretty good in the pan. I'm hoping to chocolate coat it tonight or tomorrow.

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[Joan Simpson]

Tonight I fried a chicken breast,baked potato and macaroni salad.

Mike your candy looks good!

• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by Joan Simpson.

[Mike Nolan]

It collapsed a bit more than I expected after it was poured into the pan, but for a first attempt it came out pretty good. Tastes right, though I was concerned at first that there was too much honey in it. Now I need to coat a bunch of it with chocolate before I eat it all. I may increase the amount of gelatin I use next time.

I also noted one possible issue with the list of ingredients. It calls for 2 tablespoons of sifted baking soda, which it says weighs 1/2 ounce. Maybe sifting it would cause it to be that light, but according to the USDA FoodData Central database a teaspoon of baking soda weighs 4.6 grams, which means a tablespoon would weigh 13.8 grams or a little under a half ounce. So I used the weight measure rather than the dry measure. Based on the amount it foamed up, that was plenty.

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[chocomouse]

Mike, I've never heard of sponge candy. It all sounds interesting.

For dinner tonight, we had grilled chicken thighs, potatoes roasted on the grill, and asparagus. No, not fresh from the garden, although the snow has now melted off the asparagus bed. It will be another four months til we see it, and then 5 days or so until we eat it.

[Mike Nolan]

Some books describe it as a 'regional' candy, it is also called honeycomb candy, angel food candy or sea foam, among other things. Trader Joes sometimes have it. Some candy stores, especially those that specialize in candies from other countries, will carry Violet Crumble, from Australia. In Europe, there's the Crunchie Bar.

I think it's the official candy of Buffalo NY.

[RiversideLen]

For Easter I had an uncured ham that had a tarragon apricot mustard glaze. I baked it at 325 until it reached 130 degrees. It came out real nice. Served it with spaetzles (from a bag, not homemade) with mushroom gravy.

Today I threw a few burgers on the BBQ (first time this year). Had it with a chicken veggie soup. Veggies were carrot, bok choy and kale.

Mike, your sponge candy looks good. The first time I heard of sponge candy was on a YouTube channel, I follow a candy making family (Hercules Candy) and they have it. It's one of the few things they don't make, they buy it from another candy maker they know and then they enrobe it with chocolate. It sounds like something I'd like to try.

This doesn't qualify as cooking but I also bought some Game of Thrones Oreos and enrobed them in dark chocolate.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by RiversideLen.

[Mike Nolan]

I sent some of our left over Easter ham and rye bread in to my wife's office for an end-of-the-school-year pot luck. (The soon-to-be enrobed sponge candy, I'm just waiting for the chocolate to be properly tempered, is for another departmental get-together on Thursday.)

My wife says that one of the things someone brought on Tuesday was a candy made with oreos and rollos, she said they appear to be fairly easy to make and were awesome. I'll try to get a more complete description tomorrow.

There are several recipes for sponge candy online, but I used the one in Chocolates and Confections at Home with The Culinary Institute of America, by Peter P. Greweling. (2009)

I remember finding what looked like a good one by searching for 'buffalo sponge candy'. The book had a few useful details, like when to add the gelatin and putting the pan back on the stove after adding the baking soda to encourage it to foam up.

Years ago I had a pretty good recipe for making sponge candy in the microwave that I had found online and worked out the timing to my microwave oven, but the book I had all that written in vanished and I couldn't find the original recipe or reproduce it and the timing. Since I've made it before, the CIA recipe was easy to follow.

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